This invention relates in general to the handling of thin sheet material, and more particularly to a machine and process for stacking and bundling such material or otherwise rearranging it.
In the production of magazines and books, the printing industry is to a large measure automated. As such, the industry employs a variety of machines to convert plain paper derived from large rolls into completed magazines and books. Even so, some manual procedures remain in the process, and these procedures are usually quite expensive and introduce the element of human error into the overall printing process.
The modern printing press of the type used in magazine production operates quite rapidly and efficiently, printing usually several pages that are joined together in a single sheet, which is normally folded in the press. This folded sheet is often combined with other folded sheets, but irrespective of whether or not it is folded, the product is referred to as a signature. Each printing press represents an extremely large capital investment, and even though each press is capable of printing several pages at the same time, the typical printing plant usually does not have enough presses to print all the pages of a single magazine or book at once, and even if it did, it would be unwilling to commit all of its presses to a single magazine issue. As a consequence, the delivery from a press is usually stacked manually on a pallet or perhaps hand tied into bundles. Then the press is converted to print different pages of the same magazine issue, which are in turn stacked or bundled. The same procedure occurs with respect to other presses where more pages may be printed. In the end, a relatively large number of stacks or bundles are produced with each stack or bundle containing like signatures and each signature usually being one or more folded sheets consisting of several pages of the magazine.
The stacks or bundles are next delivered to collating and binding machines which extract individual signatures from the stacks or bundles, assemble them in the proper order, and bind them together to form a completed magazine.
Heretofore, the stacking and bundling has been essentially a manual operation that represents a significant factor in the overall cost of a magazine.